Ankerside: or Once Upon a Time in the Midlands

Thursday evening. Inky Venables returns to his home town in the Midlands, sacked after ten years as a national journalist in London. It is the week before Christmas and he faces a bleak future, sustained by memories of past headlines and the hint of a job on a new Sunday regional paper. He still has his dreams.

"On the principle that a writer should write about what he knows," John Garforth says, "I know about local government and local politics. This is a dull subject, but the people involved are as accident prone and interesting as the egomaniacs in any other walk of life."